1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data migration, processing, and analysis in enterprise systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
One of the enduring problems of data management in an enterprise is how to usefully combine data from disparate sources. Database technology has advanced steadily in terms of access time, capacity, and robustness. However, corporations typically employ a mix of different platforms for various applications such as payroll, customer relationship management, manufacturing, inventory, finance, and so forth. Some of this results from the preservation of legacy systems, some from weak integration of various business functions, and some from outright poor planning. However, even a well-informed, corporate-wide technology acquisition may be executed as a series of best-in-class technology choices that results in a collection of different data management systems.
As a result, even small corporations or other organizations rarely have centralized access to all corporate data, and the problems grow rapidly with the scale of the organization. The concept of a data warehouse has emerged to address this problem. Generally, a data warehouse is a single data site derived from a number of different databases separated by geography, business function, and/or business unit (or other characteristics, according to the nature and purpose of the data source). Once a consolidated data warehouse is prepared, it is possible to analyze data for an entire entity, such as a corporation.
As a significant disadvantage, data consolidation has remained, to this day, a custom solution. A team of consultants or software professionals may take months to pore through source databases in order to ensure that data from different sources is consistently represented within the data warehouse. Even once an integrated schema has been devised for all of the source data, the data sources must be carefully combined to ensure that redundancies are eliminated as well as that unique items are not unintentionally combined. Furthermore, since each resulting schema is unique, a new set of software tools must be created or configured to generate useful reports and analysis from the combined data.
There remains a need for an improved technique for migrating data from disparate data sources into a single data source suitable for business analysis.